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Greg Ransom asked about the use of Knight's Risk, Uncertainty and Profit  
as a textbook. 
 
Outside of the LSE, I have found no evidence that Knight's book was used 
as a textbook. It frequently appeared on the reading list of courses 
beyond the introductory level, but was not used as the major text. At the 
LSE, Robbins used Knight's book first (sometime in the late 1920s?, 
perhaps through the suggestion of Allyn Young, who had supervised the book 
as a dissertation?), and its use continued when Hayek joined him in 
teaching theory. It was the classroom use of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit 
at the LSE that prompted the 1933 reprint of the book in the LSE Reprint 
series -- the US publisher discontinued the book and Robbins/Hayek needed 
to keep it in print (records at the LSE show that Risk, Uncertainty and  
Profit was the sales leader in the LSE Reprint series throughout the  
1930s and 1940s by a large margin, but that probably reflects its use in  
the LSE course). 
 
Knight himself used Ely's text when he taught introductory economics at  
the University of Iowa in the 1920s. He supplemented Ely with a set of  
handouts which he obviously intended to make into a textbook, and in fact  
Allyn Young proofread several chapters of Knight's "text" in the 1920s  
before he died. Knight's thoughts of publishing a textbook to compete with  
Ely's died with Young -- who had suggested he pursue the project. Knight  
did try two more times to create a textbook (once in the late 1930s and  
again in the mid-1940s) but neither project was completed. 
 
The supplemental material Knight wrote during the 1920s at Iowa was 
adopted in the College of the University of Chicago as required reading 
for the general social science course that Harry Gideonese and others 
created in the early 1930s (after Knight's move to Chicago in 1928). A 
set of four short chapters, Knight's material formed the basic intro to 
economics that students in the General Social Science course read until 
well into the 1940s. The material also served as background reading for 
the divisional course in economics that Henry Simons taught, and 
eventually was published as The Economic Organization in 1951 (without  
Knight's permission!). That work is generally known as Knight's text,  
although he never saw it as more than an outline of his planned text! 
 
Ross B. Emmett 
Manager, Electronic Information, History of Economics Society  
Augustana University College 
e-mail: [log in to unmask] 
URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmer 
 
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